Now the TV is watching you

For more than four decades, the annual tech show has been used as a platform for companies to show their wares. The VCR, for example, was unveiled at it in 1970 and in 1981 the camcorder and CD player made an appearance. The Mini Disc player debuted there in 1993, HD TV in 1998, plasma TV in 2001 and 3D TV in 2009.

The first show took place in New York in 1967 with 200 exhibitors and 17,500 attendees. This year more than 3000 exhibitors showcased their gadgets and gizmos spread across two venues covering 177,000 square metres of exhibition space (35 American football fields).

The 2013 show was all about tech companies showing off what advancements or alterations they had made to existing technologies to make them even better. From prototype smartphone screens that can bend, to humungous tablets the size of a coffee table that can be used to play Monopoly, there was something for everyone.

For TV set manufacturers, the tech fair was a chance to show how much smarter their TVs were becoming. So-called smart TVs unveiled this week at the Las Vegas show offered technologies that watch the viewer, in an effort to offer more relevant programming.

Bendable ... furture phones and tablets. Above, a Samsung prototype which can bend into a tube.

Chinese manufacturer TCL unveiled a new TV and set-top box to be sold later this year in the US using the Google TV platform, which recognises who is watching in order to suggest potential programs.

Samsung unveiled a similar platform that uses a technology called S Recommendation that allows a user to speak to their TV to discover shows they would want to watch. The new Samsung TVs also take advantage of hand gestures and an interface called Smart Hub, which lets users browse what is on TV, movies and TV shows.

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Samsung also revealed that it would soon begin selling special viewing glasses that would allow two people to view different channels from the same TV at the same time - a concept quickly dubbed as "anti-social" and "hate vision" by some in the tech industry. Samsung's F9500 television is the first in the world to offer this feature, dubbed ''multi-view'', using screen technology called ''organic light-emitting diode'', or OLED.

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Another advantage of OLED is being able to use it on thin plastic screens, enabling for future phones and tablets that can bend. A prototype phone shown off by Samsung in a keynote did not appear flexible enough to fold in half like a piece of paper, but it could bend into a tube. For the bendable phone, Samsung laid OLED chemicals over thin plastic instead of glass. That's a trick you can't pull off with liquid crystals in standard displays.

Bigger smartphones - "phablets" (devices between 13 and 18 centimetres diagonally) - were also a hot ticket item on show, as were oversized tablets.

With a screen measuring 15.5 centimetres diagonally, Chinese tech giant Huawei unveiled its Ascend Mate smartphone, which looks much more like a small tablet than a phone. Powered by Google's Android Jelly Bean operating system, the Mate sports a fast 1.5GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. Powering it is a large 4050 mAh battery.

A Lenovo PC the size of a coffee table that works like a gigantic tablet and lets four people use it at once was also on show. Running Windows 8, it sports a 68-centimetre screen and weighs 6.8 kilograms. For perspective, it's the size of eight iPads stitched together. Named the Horizon Table PC, it will cost $US1699 ($1617) when it goes on sale later this year and include plastic ''strikers'' for Air Hockey, and joysticks that attach to the screen.

Panasonic also unveiled the world's first ultra high definition 50.8-centimetre tablet at the fair in prototype form, aimed at those in need of quality graphics such as photographers. Designed to sit on a table, it's about 1 centimetre thick and has not been given a name or release date.

One of the more quirkier gadgets seen on the show floor was the HAPIfork, designed for people who eat too fast. As the name might suggest, it's a fork, but with a motion sensor built-in that knows when you are lifting it to your mouth.

If you're eating too fast, it vibrates as a warning. But it won't know how healthy or how big each bite you take will be, so shovelling a plate of salad will likely be judged as less healthy than slowly putting away bacon. It is set to ship around April or May for $US99 on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter.